A minor Very Important point which I don’t think has been mentioned yet: the intro is the ‘coin insert’ sound effect from classic 1981 arcade game Frogger. A not inconsiderable number of previous ‘hits’ had included samples from video games (“Lemmings”, SFX, #51 in May 93; “Tetris”, Dr Spin, #6 in Oct 92; “Supermarioland”, Ambassadors of Funk, #10 in Oct 92; “SuperSonic”, H.W.A., #33 in Dec 92) but always as the main overt gimmick of a track as pointed up in the title – though the thrill of recognition is certainly an intended bonus I don’t think “Freak Like Me” expects recognition, and I feel this marks another important step in the aestheticisation of video game sound in pop music, especially inside the same twelve months as “21 Seconds” indicated the cues from game sound that grime would go on to mine and flaunt. (Contemporary video game music, of course, was [and had been for some time] often conspicuously failing to return the favour and instead trying to sound as non-electronic as possible by imitating/drawing inspiration from Western art music, now it had the technical capacity to do so*; so it is that Grant Kirkland currently finds himself nestling next to Saint-Saens and Prokofiev in the Classic FM Hall of Fame.)

*Manic Miner perhaps demonstrating why waiting until it had the technical capacity to do so was necessary :-(

]]>By: Girl with Curious Hairhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2191843
Fri, 18 Aug 2017 21:24:56 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2191843That’s a really good review of a song that, if I’m honest, I remember very little of. But I do like it when somebody makes a strong case for a song I’d neglected.

I was at a very different point in life to Tom and, I think, quite a few of the other posters here. Something of a counterpoint to #26, and Billy’s end of history feeling in Brent Cross Dixons: when you’re about 11 years old, history barely registers at all: everything around you exists Just Because, and the past is something totally disconnected.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I didn’t know of, and wouldn’t have cared about, the context of FLM, nor the history of its components. I was eleven, only just turned, and I was growing up as a pre-teen in a period when the charts seemed geared towards pre-teens more than ever. I could afford to be picky, and in my youthful naivety the Sugababes felt like another girl-band in a pleasantly stuffed landscape.

So yeah, my feeling about this song is one of missed connections. I was too young for the sex. (But now I think about it, I think sex is a hard sell in any girl/boy-band set-up: too many voices, too much harmony, not enough friction or wild-eyed nastiness. I’m struggling to think of any boy/girl-band song that really sold sex, with the exception of Blackstreet and No Diggity. Answers on a postcard please.)

I kinda missed out on the champagne-flute years of the early 2000s too: the credit crunch didn’t happen until 2008, it’s true, but Tom’s comments about the nature of bubbles ring especially true here.

So listening back to this now, trying to take some of this context and history on my shoulders… I know I’ve said sex is a hard sell in this kind of set-up, and I stand by that, but the song does indeed peak on “good for ME!”, when the Babes manage break out of that 2-chord pattern that’s dominated the song. There’s your tension and release right there.

Sadly, though, that makes the song something of a one trick pony for me: it’s all in that moment of ecstatic release. All that rocking back and forth to get there, it feels like a simple means to an end, and surely that’s not quite right?

Actually, that paragraph reads harsher than I want it to. This is a solid 7/10 for me: it’s well-built, and from good parts too, and my ability to catch all the magic you guys do appears to be more my problem than the song’s. There are some parties you just can’t afford to be late to, I guess.

]]>By: timbohttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2183138
Sat, 22 Jul 2017 16:48:51 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2183138This was a totally thrilling comeback – and totally unexpected. I loved “Overload” and a couple of other earlier singles (Run for Cover). But I’d assumed they were dead and buried, especially as (as mentioned) they seemed to be an All Saints facsimile. (Incidentally, it was pretty obvious that – around this time – Blue seemed to be created to be the male All Saints, but without any of the tunes). Maybe it was a bit of a last throw of the dice, but Richard X was great at creating these big, grinding, electro-clashy records (see Rachel Stevens “Some Girls’). And this took the 2 Many DJ’s mash-up obsession to the mainstream.
Was going to say they didn’t really better this….with the possible exception of a bunnyable ttrack from 2005.
So…a great British girl group in 2002…..pre-staging THE great British girl group emerging at the end of the year…..
]]>By: mapman132http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2181988
Wed, 19 Jul 2017 01:28:42 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2181988I started to skip ahead on the bunnies list near the end of last summer (I’m at the beginning of 2014 right now), so I first heard this about 10 months ago. While Popular – and Freaky Trigger in general – has inspired a diverse array of MP3 purchases by me – everything from Lieutenant Pigeon to Kero Kero Bonito – there are only two tracks that I downloaded within moments of my first listen. “Pure Shores” was one. “Freak Like Me” was the other one.

I had a feeling this would be an epic review and Tom did not disappoint. Great review. Great record. 10.

]]>By: punctumhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2181756
Tue, 18 Jul 2017 10:45:40 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2181756At the time of “Freak Like Me,” the bootleg craze had yet to reach the basements of nostalgia, ironic or otherwise. No “comedians” turned up on Channel 4, reminiscing or being instructed to reminisce about squeezing themselves into tiny clubs just off Tottenham Court Road to watch a series of hopefuls attempting to mash up Russ Abbot with Throbbing Gristle, or more prosaically that day’s latest variation on “Get Ur Freak On,” and wondering what that was all about, eh, and indeed, eh. It never happened.

Yet, as with everything, the idea, if not the actual physical practice, of bootlegging seamlessly seeped into the pop mainstream. Revisiting Richard X’s 2003 album Richard X Presents The X-Factor – an album which might have caused a sensation had it been released eighteen months earlier, or three years later – one is reminded that future pop stars like Mark Ronson must have been paying close attention.

“We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends” was the original Girls On Top seven-inch mashing of Numan’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” and at the time I publicly regretted several key factors omitted from the Sugababes record, notably the Cramps-sampled intro, the extraordinary double explosion (which may or may not have been sampled from the Twin Towers) which comes after the line “There’s just one thing that a man must do” and the general messiness and noisiness of the intentionally blurred Girls On Top outline.

In addition, the “sanctioned” main mix of “Freak Like Me” initially seemed to me intent on burying all the noise and unrest – and to an extent even Tubeway Army – in the distant background. But the “We Don’t Give A Damn” mix, despite missing the above components, has endured as a pop record and represented not just an important comeback for the Sugababes, having lost a member and been dropped by London Records the previous year after their debut album failed to go triple platinum, but also a rebirth and justification of New Pop; I grasped it like an oxygen cylinder.

The Sugababes materialise as virtual replicants out of the murky mist of squashed synths and etiolated bleeps with a confident collective vocal (one body divided by three prisms of variant light) which actually mirrors the kind of dialogue such a visitor might have conducted with Numan’s original protagonist (“I’ve got a freaky secret,” “I’m packing all the things that you need”). The Eno oscillating wolf whistle after the first “satisfy me” remains intact, as does the cumulative piling up of indistinct signals and generator howls at the end (signalled by the starting pistol of the last, anguished “Good for me-e-EE!”) over which the girls sing 31st century cabaret, complete with handclaps. In truth, it was an astounding comeback, and I regret that its greatness may be belittled by some of the above minor provisos; after months of polite young boys, here were the girls injecting much-needed cortisone into the hardening arteries of British pop, and it felt as though both the Sugababes and “we” had won. It would have towered even in 1982; in 2002 it was a colossus of sneaky promise. 8

]]>By: Billy Hickshttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2180209
Sat, 15 Jul 2017 12:23:57 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2180209Actually punched the air in triumph when I saw that 10 at the end.

Aged 13, I knew nothing about Gary Numan and this was my introduction to the Sugababes, having missed Overload at the time. I just saw it as one of the most modern, most futuristic pop songs I’d ever heard (yep, I’m aware of the irony of that), and my main memory of it is browsing Dixons Brent Cross that summer, gazing in wonder at all the DVD players, widescreen TV and Windows XP PCs that our household didn’t yet have. While primitive to today’s smartphone/tablet world, it felt like there was nothing else left that was yet to be invented – the future had, most definitely, arrived.

Circa 2008, I remember seeing both this track and a Christmas ’02 bunny as defining the sound of noughties pop to the point where both could have come out at the end of the decade and still sound fresh.

]]>By: Holiday Kirkhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2179307
Thu, 13 Jul 2017 19:06:22 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2179307pls don’t make us wait like that next time ;_;
]]>By: Lee Saundershttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2179256
Thu, 13 Jul 2017 16:50:27 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2179256Another thing I love about Freak Like Me is the other things X added to the backdrop. A few seconds of beeping that occur throughout the song, sporadic whooshing, and so on. They’re all very subtle but all very effective. The somehow more effervescent version on X’s album that’s much more similar to the Girls on Top track is no different in this respect, and where the chorus doesn’t return until fade out are other little noises, a brief drone, a few seconds of lowly mixed vocals. Its the little touches like these that, inadvertently or not, point more towards what Sugababes tracks were like after this.
]]>By: Philhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178981
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 18:26:11 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178981Meant to say, there’s something distinctly other-worldly (or altered-state-y) about the Girls on Top track – a real sense of a ‘journey into sound’, destination unknown – and that’s one of the things that still works in the Sugababes version. (At this point I resist the temptation to sneak in drug references, particularly since they’d be references to drugs I haven’t even used.) Getting something like that into the charts, let alone to number 1 – respect.
]]>By: Philhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178967
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:00:15 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178967I bought Replicas when it came out, so I really ought to have hated this. Don’t though. Having listened to all the precursor tracks, what I find really interesting about this record is that it sounds better than any of them – richer and weirder, smoother and scuzzier, more enveloping and more glitchy. None of the singers can hold a candle to Adina Howard – and it’s a shame they didn’t work harder on making that “Good! For! ME!” cut through – but in the scheme of things that’s a minor problem. 9, but a good 9. (But what the hell is going on in the video?)
]]>By: ThePensmithhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178955
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:20:47 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178955#18 – I have both the Siobhan Donaghy albums, although interestingly ‘Revolution In Me’ has earned more spins on my iTunes library than ‘Ghosts’. May possibly be because it took me until five years ago to purchase a second hand copy of the latter (I only had ‘Don’t Give It Up’ and ’12 Bar Acid Blues’ on my iTunes prior to that). But some truly wonderful stuff on that first album. Particularly ‘Iodine’ and ‘Nothing But Song’.
]]>By: Cumbrianhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178951
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:02:22 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178951“Obviously ditching band members and replacing them with other people is surely a thing that had been going on for a while, but rarely so publicly and with so much acrimony as the uncermonious bullying-out”

Beyonce says hi.

]]>By: adminhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178934
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:50:57 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178934“Scooter’s take on Supertramp” you say. http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/12/the-ft-top-100-tracks-of-all-time-22-joy-division-–-love-will-tear-us-apart-and-21-scooter-–-ramp-the-logical-song/
]]>By: Kinitawowihttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178904
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 12:25:24 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178904I realised a few months ago that you’d be giving this a ten (there was a hint that one was coming a year or so back); then there was that thought mid-review that said “nah, he’s going to nine out”, and then it landed.

A worthy behemoth of a review for a song I just can’t get behind, though. Obviously ditching band members and replacing them with other people is surely a thing that had been going on for a while, but rarely so publicly and with so much acrimony as the uncermonious bullying-out of what felt like the Sugababes’ strongest link; you mentioned Ghosts already, but Siobhan Donaghy’s Revolution In Me was a stunning album.

So shoving her out, bringing in somebody else (an ex-Atomic Kitten no less!) and changing to a whole new sound with a hip new producer, mashing together two superior songs with scarcely an ounce of creativity? It reeked. It reeked of “product”. Mashed up bands and mashed up songs, recompiled and repackaged for a better sell; for better or worse, the trend for the next few years. (Look at what it shares Now! 52 disc space with; Like A Prayer by Mad’House, a band inspired by a Madonna and Black Legend mashup; Scooter’s take on Supertramp; Intenso Project relying on 10cc – and that’s just disc 1!)

And what of this particular product? Well, it’s more interesting than I first gave it credit for, I’ll cop to that; there’s something to be said for making something so expansive out of something as constrained as Are Friends Electric, a song that always wanted to break out of its own claustrophobia but never managed it. But it still never manages to break free from its superior parts.

6.

]]>By: Lee Saundershttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178778
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 01:15:51 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178778Wow, waited months and then I missed most of the fun ha. Excellent review, glad to see your love for it is still as strong all these years later, and definitely a 10 from me too. A more than stellar ending to the “Numan revival trilogy” of early 00s pop (that also includes Armand van Helen’s rather silly Koochy and Basement Jaxx’s wonderful Where’s Your Head At), while the birth of something much bigger.
]]>By: EPGhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178763
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 23:33:05 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178763This was about where I came into listening to pop music for the second time. The first time was during the dominance of dance tracks, at the age when you are too young to know that music changes every few years. Even by ’02, I had no clue who Gary Numan was or that he played a role here. This track’s good, and more people should record tracks like it. It’s just not as good as “”Friends””. Maybe 8 or 9, bearing in mind I’d give a 10 for Gary. But unlike Gary, Sugababes got me into the market for pop music with their big songs of 2002, just like a different female performer later in the year. Each in their way made overtures to the rock audience, as writers above noted in the case of Sugababes. Young male pop-sceptics, raised to look askance at Britney, were helped along by that inclusivity. As also alluded to above, many guys furthermore liked them for other reasons.

Fifteen years is a funny little interval. Everything still looks a bit current but right-angled after half a generation. We know who has ended up toppest of the poppest today and it looks a lot more like a pop version of Indie Dave than the babes (or Gary). I think it’s because the modern world and the Internet make kids sad, and they want music for sadness.

We also know that, if this inclusivity increased the audience for pop music, it didn’t show up in the market at all, and the British music industry’s pipeline went a bit dry until the top guys worked out how to make Internet money. Watch the charts go by for the next few years as if they were cars: Look, there goes a TV star. There go the last few dance artists I remember from my friends’ Euphoria CDs. There’s a US import. And another. After all, it’s 2002 so we have music industry globalisation, which devalues the charts’ parochial importance in British and even European culture. Most of my school – white small-town or rural people – were listening to hip-hop or rap. Doubt that would have happened before Eminem. Anyway, they weren’t buying Sugababes.

This is a great project. It was a pleasure to tease out its intellectual or ideological standpoint from the posts and the comments. I worked out, more or less, the position that would be taken on this song, and that it would be an apotheosis of the blog, but it’s the writing that’s the pleasure to read.

On that note: I do think the local approach to artifice and play here is very identifiable as being in the English cultural tradition, at least at the elite level of the ancient universities and the London salons. Sugababes and Richard X are in line with that. It’s clear what they are doing. The English praise artifice, but only when you are honest about it and not actually trying to live it out, because they do not want to be fooled. Don’t get too clever or else you end up denigrated like poor Phil Collins! Or Bowie, fifteen years ago – now THAT was some reputational turnaround.

]]>By: JLucashttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178754
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 23:08:39 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178754Huzzah! I’d just about given this up for dead.

Freak Like Me is a special record for me. Back in 2000, I was witnessing the sad disintegration of my childhood pop icons The Spice Girls, and the One Touch album proved to be an important transition record for me into a more sophisticated and introspective style of pop music.

You can imagine how I felt when, once again, the abrupt departure of the central redhead seemed to bring about the untimely demise of the group. However, in time the Sugababes would prove to be the anti-Spice Girls in the sense that no member of the group was irreplaceable. Not to skip ahead, but it’s worth noting that by the end of their run they didn’t have a single founding member remaining.

They never actually made a better record than One Touch to my mind – or a better single than Overload, which would have made for a fabulous Popular entry. But Freak Like Me was a thrilling return. For one thing, after they lost their de facto lead singer and record deal, I never expected them to come back at all. The pop climate in 2002 was harsh and unforgiving, second acts were the exception rather than the rule. Also, this was still largely a pre-social media era. I don’t recall picking up on any advance buzz until the video for Freak Like Me dropped.

What a video it was, too. They were perceived as very trendy in the One Touch era, but there was also an awkwardness and a diffidence to them, which was now replaced by confidence and aggressive sexuality. The vampire theme was very of the moment and a perfect way to introduce Heidi as the new member of the group. Song-wise, it contained enough familiar elements mixed up in new enough ways (this being – as Tom notes – before mash up records really became ubiquitous) to feel like an instant classic.

It remains the only record I’ve ever skipped school to buy. I remember sitting in my bedroom playing the CD single on a loop. When it went to #1 I was thrilled. I followed their career from this point on, and enjoyed a lot of what came after. But I never loved them quite this much again. It was, to coin a phrase from a far less significant chart topper, a perfect moment in pop.

10

]]>By: ThePensmithhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178690
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 17:23:54 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178690Excellent thesis Tom. Even my own review of ‘Freak…’ for my 00s girl group top 40 review column on Buzzjack about two years ago – which this here corner of the web takes its inspiration from – can’t hold a candle to your deconstruction.

This is also a 10 for me. Why? As you’ve touched on so eloquently, it broke so many barriers down in terms of pop music and how it was viewed by the wider public, and for me, certainly across the first two incarnations of their lineup, the Sugababes broke down the barn door for pop acts to cross over and have a more universal appeal than ever before, simply by releasing singles and albums of such a high quality, which particularly at the start of the 00s was in short supply.

It’s easy to forget now, with all the personnel dramas that were to follow them like a bad smell, but they were the first ever girl group to win a Q Award for Best Single with this – Gary Numan presented them with their trophy I recall – and then a year on from this they were the first girl group to appear on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. There are numerous performers of pop centred bunnies to come in the next 15 years that crossed the same path as them (hell even some before who didn’t reach the same heights. All Saints, for instance), who I feel owe it all to them for changing things and shifting people’s perceptions of what good music was, be it pop, R&B or otherwise.

#2 watch: the first of three runners up appearances in 2002 began here for S Club Juniors, whose ‘One Step Closer’ was but a mere 1000 copies off debuting at the top. As fine an addition as any to sit alongside their senior counterparts’ catalogue of hits, and if it’d come out the week before it’d have seen off Oasis, but it just obviously came up against a much stronger record, although it held its #2 berth the following week whilst the next bunny toppled Sugababes.

In fact I don’t think I’d heard it (though I knew of its theoretical basis) until university – I was playing “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” aloud in a communal space (how antisocial) and someone asked if it was the song sampled in this, so I put it on to illustrate. Tom is spot on about the genius of moving the second melody to the end where it serves as cathartic release; I also agree with weej that, while the rickety mismatch is part of the pleasure of This Sort Of Thing, there are areas where the mashup swerves a little too far from gelling – in particular, the “I’ve got a freaky secret everybody sing / ‘Cause we don’t give a damn about a thing” couplet carries an aura of “oh shit this doesn’t work, just staccato it out quickly and hope no one notices” for me. Whereas “Being Nobody” (are we allowed to talk about that here?) is glorious to these ears the whole way through, wish we could have had that instead (well, alright, not instead, in addition to).

I was going to mention one of their other singles, possibly my favourite Sbabes song, on the assumption that given how shoddy (in a good way) it sounds it must have been one of their early minor hits; however it is still to come (not bunnied though) so I’ll leave it.

It’s a bit of a shame that we’re now entering an era where the critical consensus is already settled, but that was always encoded in the Popular project I suppose.

]]>By: James BChttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178621
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 10:50:30 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178621I don’t like this, I’m afraid. I’m not keen on Numan’s dreary grind and I find the vocal weak and uninterested. Not for me. It’s weird because I like other material by both the group and the producer (though not by Gary Numan and his freaky dystopian future that we all find so mind-blowingly cool).

In my opinion it does the Sugababes a disservice to hold this up as their best song, or even one of their best songs, since the idea predated them and X could have got more or less any group or vocalist to do it with a similar result. Many later singles are much better and much more them.

]]>By: Matt DChttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178596
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 08:58:32 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178596The early 00s pop boom had been going on for a while but other than the occasional Destiny’s Child song this is the first time the #1 spot really reflects that, but there’s a lot of magic to come over the next few years. The Sugababes themselves will spend more of the decade at #1 than anyone else – and I bet that if you asked that in a pub quiz now, hardly anyone would guess correctly.
]]>By: lonepilgrimhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178590
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 08:36:52 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178590being of a certain age I recognised the Numan song but, like Tommy, I assumed that the vocal was an original tune that had been retrofitted to the earlier track. I’ve now listened to the Adina Howard original for the first time and like it. Nevertheless the edited, churning ‘Are Friends Electric’ sample turns this into an unstoppable juggernaut. That has its pros and cons IMO. If this popped up on the dance floor it would be wonderful. Hearing it unexpectedly on the radio – fantastic. Wanting to listen to it again and again. Not so much. 8 from me.
]]>By: Toddhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178502
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:35:58 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178502I too have intense memories of the Great Pop Migration of 2002 — the delirious joy of no longer having to pretend that I liked funkless hipster music and was free to listen to music that wasn’t cool. Of course this soon curdled into its own new brand of hipster rules, as those comic panels will attest, and “Freak Like Me” doesn’t hold the thrill for me it did in 2002. This might be because I’m now much more familiar with the original; I will back up Weej on this one, the girls just don’t sell it, certainly not like Adina does. (Part of me also wonders if the Gary Numan sample had a — ughhhghhhh — rockist appeal that helped it cross over.)
]]>By: weejhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2017/07/sugababes-freak-like-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2178479
Mon, 10 Jul 2017 22:43:12 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30299#comment-2178479Welcome back, Tom, missed this blog of late. Very enjoyable read, but afraid I’ll join AMZ1981 on the dissenting side, though for slightly different reasons. The first is musical, a problem common to a lot of mashup-derived material, especially when one whole song is laid on top of another – one bit gels, then another bit just doesn’t quite. In this case the perfectly nice chorus sounds dull next to the excellent verses, and yes, great when the riff kicks in after, but still the “freak in the morning, freak in the evening” bit feels like its sort of selotaped onto the rest of the song. The second reason is just a feeling – one I’m ready to reconsider, I should add. There is just something about these lyrics coming out of these girls mouths which feels kind of exploitative and wrong. Not in a “women can’t have a libido” kind of way, just that I don’t buy it, it feels like they’ve been told to sing about this, they know it sells, and they are going along with it. TBH this is my problem with a lot of British pop of the 2000s, but particularly here it stops me enjoying the track.
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